Audiobook · read by volunteers
Tale of Peter Mink
Arthur Scott Bailey (1877–1949)
Read by Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014) · 19 chapters · 1 h 53
About the book
Peter Mink is different from the other animals in the woods, and he cannot help it. His habits are his own, and in this story from Arthur Scott Bailey’s long series of tales about the creatures of the forest and the meadow, those habits cause a fair amount of mischief and a fair amount of amusement. The book is gentle, orderly and quietly instructive: Bailey wove natural history into his stories, so that children learn how animals live while following their small adventures. Chapters with titles such as How Peter Was Different, Sawing Wood and The Lecture promise a mixture of mischief and good sense. Nineteen short recordings, under two hours, make it a pleasant bedtime story for the youngest listeners.
Introduction
Arthur Scott Bailey (1877-1949) wrote more than forty books for children. His method was to centre his plots in the worlds of animals, birds and insects, and to weave natural history into the stories so that readers learned while they enjoyed themselves. The Tale of Peter Mink, published in 1916, belongs to his Sleepy-Time Tales series, a set of books written to be read aloud at the end of the day.
The stories are short and uncomplicated. Each chapter is a small episode in the life of Peter Mink, beginning with the chapter that tells how he was different from his neighbours and going on to scenes such as sawing wood, a lecture and the passing of the hat. The style is plain and calm.
Today the book can be enjoyed for its old-fashioned charm and for the picture it gives of how animal stories for young children were written in the early twentieth century. Parents and grandparents may find that it reads aloud very well.
The recording is in nineteen files, with chapter titles that begin with a number, and it lasts a little under two hours. It is read by a LibriVox volunteer, Lucy Burgoyne. It is an excellent choice for bedtime, car journeys or any quiet moment. Since the chapters are brief, it is easy to listen to one or two at a time, and children may enjoy hearing the same story more than once. The book is also a pleasant example of how nature study was brought into the nursery in the years before the First World War.
Public domain
Arthur Scott Bailey died in 1949: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text